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Our national conversation about gender identity is one big miscommunication

I had a friend in junior high whose father and uncle decided they’d had enough of his long hair (beautiful, silken, golden wheat-colored, cascading well below his shoulders). They trapped him in the bathroom one Sunday night, held him against […]

A Brief Scene from “Old Music for New People:” how to hold a knife

“First of all, you need to relax,” Mom said. She put her hand on Rita’s wrist. “Calm down. Never hold a paring knife like you want to kill someone. It’s not a weapon. It’s an instrument. You need to learn that. Maybe someday you’ll want to become a surgeon.”

Brain on music

The Psychology of Sound

I’ve spent my entire life astounded by the magic of music, appreciating everything from opera and Gregorian chant to bluegrass and every kind of jazz there is. But what exactly is being touched in us and inspired when we listen […]

Watching Fiction Become What It Wants: Stories Crying to Become a Novel

I’ve spent the spring adapting stories I began writing almost a decade ago into a novel. The stories all had to do somehow with a character I called Julia Davenport. It’s been quite an interesting task converting short stories into […]

Spilling Your Guts: Writing That Makes a Beautiful Mess

It took me at least a year of college to learn to live with my Midwestern sincerity. I went to a school on the West Coast full of super smart people. That was bad enough — being kind of average […]

Holidays and Your Writer: Advice to Readers, Families, and Friends

This is a repost from earlier in December.  Indie authors are setting up shop in bedrooms and dining rooms and kitchen tables on every street in every neighborhood from Staten Island to Oahu. In 2005 about 300,000 new book titles […]

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